Villa d’Este, Tivoli – A Renaissance Garden of Water and Wonder

Around 30 kilometres east of Rome, the historic hill town of Tivoli rises above the countryside of Lazio, surrounded by wooded slopes, olive groves and the deep valley carved by the River Aniene. Known to the Romans as Tibur, the town had been celebrated for its landscape and waters long before the Renaissance. Roman emperors, aristocrats, and poets were drawn here, and the remains of Hadrian’s vast villa still lie beyond the modern town.

But Tivoli boasts another kind of villa entirely, a creation from more than fourteen centuries past, driven by a vision as ambitious as Hadrian’s.

Villa d’Este is one of the splendid gardens of the Italian Renaissance, a place where architecture, landscape, classical mythology, and water were brought together on an extraordinary scale. Rather than simply ornamenting the garden, water became its defining element. It rushes down cascades, passes through hidden channels, emerges from masks and mythical creatures, fills long pools, powers fountains, and once even animated mechanical birds and music.

The result is not merely a garden filled with fountains. It is a landscape designed almost as theatre.

UNESCO, which inscribed Villa d’Este on the World Heritage List in 2001, describes it as one of the earliest and finest examples of the giardino delle meraviglie – the “garden of wonders” – and recognises the profound influence it exerted on garden design throughout Europe.

A Cardinal’s Renaissance Dream

The story of Villa d’Este begins with Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, one of the most powerful churchmen of sixteenth-century Italy. He was the son of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and Lucrezia Borgia, and belonged to one of Italy’s great Renaissance dynasties.

In 1550, Ippolito was appointed governor of Tivoli. The residence made available to him, however, was considerably less magnificent than his position and ambitions demanded. Part of an existing Benedictine convent beside the church of Santa Maria Maggiore was eventually incorporated into a new palace, while the steep hillside below was transformed into an immense terraced garden.

The principal creative force behind the project was Pirro Ligorio, an architect, painter, and antiquarian with an intense knowledge of the ancient world. Ligorio worked with Ippolito and the humanist Marc-Antoine Muret to create not only an impressive residence but an elaborate intellectual and symbolic landscape. Construction accelerated during the 1560s, and by the cardinal’s death in 1572 much of the extraordinary garden had taken shape.

The earlier monastery was not simply demolished. Parts of it were absorbed into the palace, including the cloister, which became the central courtyard. This helps explain some irregularities in the architecture and layout. The palace’s interior rooms, in contrast to its restrained garden-facing facade, are lavishly adorned with frescoes portraying mythology, allegory, and Tivoli’s history and landscape.

The garden below, however, is where Ippolito’s vision becomes truly extraordinary.

Making Water Defy the Hillside

The steep terrain could easily have been considered an obstacle. Instead, it became the mechanism that made the garden possible.

Beginning around 1560, enormous effort went into obtaining sufficient water for the fountains. An early attempt to capture water from Monte Sant’Angelo proved inadequate, and in 1564–65 an underground canal was constructed beneath Tivoli to draw water from the Aniene. Once it entered the estate, the difference in elevation allowed the water to move through the garden through the natural force of gravity.

This is one aspect of Villa d’Este that I find most remarkable.

There were no modern electric pumps driving its great Renaissance spectacle. The hillside itself provided the energy. Water was channelled, divided and redirected through an intricate hydraulic system before emerging in fountains, basins, cascades, grottoes and unexpected jets.

In this sense, the landscape was not simply the setting for Villa d’Este. It was essential to its creation.

Water also brought movement and sound into the formal geometry of the garden. Sometimes it whispers across moss-covered stone. Elsewhere it falls in sheets or bursts upwards with considerable force. The experience continually changes as you descend through the terraces.

The garden was designed to surprise as much as to impress. Hidden jets could soak unsuspecting visitors, while hydraulic mechanisms created sounds and movement. Renaissance visitors were encountering something that blurred the boundaries between garden, engineering, sculpture, and performance.

Mythology in the Garden

Classical mythology at Villa d’Este is far more than decoration.

Ligorio, deeply immersed in the study of antiquity, created a garden in which myths, local traditions, and the Este family’s own symbolism became intertwined.

One of the most important figures was Hercules. Sixteenth-century traditions connected Hercules both with Tivoli and with the ancestry claimed by the Este family. The garden could therefore be interpreted symbolically as a new Garden of the Hesperides, the mythical garden where Hercules obtained the golden apples guarded by the dragon Ladon. The imagery of Hercules appeared both within the palace and throughout the garden.

Other classical figures appear everywhere: river gods, nymphs, Apollo, Orpheus, Diana, and the ancient Sibyl of Tivoli.

These references create another layer in the garden. Villa d’Este is not attempting to recreate ancient Rome literally. It is a Renaissance interpretation of antiquity, a world imagined through ruins, texts, mythology, and the landscape surrounding Tivoli.

Nowhere is this relationship between landscape and myth clearer than at the magnificent Fontana dell’Ovato, or Oval Fountain.

The Fountain of Tivoli

The Oval Fountain is one of the garden’s outstanding achievements and perhaps the place that most clearly expresses Tivoli’s identity.

Water pours dramatically from an elevated artificial landscape into the large oval basin below. Behind it are grottoes and figures representing the waters and mountains surrounding Tivoli, including the rivers Aniene and Ercolano. Above the cascade stands the Sibyl Albunea, one of the legendary prophetic figures associated with ancient Tibur.

The fountain therefore represents more than an impressive display of water. The design harmoniously combines Tivoli’s natural scenery with architectural creations and artfully sculpted forms.

From the Oval Fountain begins one of the most celebrated walks at Villa d’Este, the Avenue of the Hundred Fountains.

The Hundred Fountains

Running across the hillside rather than directly down it, the Viale Delle Cento Fontane forms one of the most memorable perspectives in the entire garden.

Water travels along three long parallel channels, emerging through a succession of sculpted masks, eagles, fleur-de-lys, obelisks and other forms. Despite its famous name, the composition contains considerably more than one hundred individual water outlets.

Originally, the avenue was even more elaborate. Reliefs representing episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses once decorated the wall, although much of this sculptural programme has disappeared over the centuries.

The fountains that still exist, however, produce an exceptional symphony of stone, vegetation, and cascading water.

At one end stands the Oval Fountain, symbolising Tivoli. At the other is the Rometta, or “Little Rome”.

This arrangement creates one of the most intriguing ideas within the garden: a symbolic relationship between Tivoli and Rome.

A Little Rome in Tivoli

The Rometta was conceived as an imaginative representation of ancient Rome.

Completed in the sixteenth century, it originally incorporated miniature representations of Roman monuments, many of which were later lost. The surviving composition includes the goddess Roma and imagery associated with Romulus and Remus, while a boat representing Tiber Island recalls the distinctive island in the river at the centre of Rome. Water symbolises the meeting of the Aniene and the Tiber.

There is something wonderfully Renaissance about the idea.

At one end of the terrace stands Tivoli, represented through mountains, rivers and its ancient Sibyl. At the other lies Rome, compressed into a theatrical landscape of water, sculpture, and memory.

The Avenue of the Hundred Fountains flows between them. Geography emerges from the garden, imbued with allegorical meaning.

Dragons, Music and Mechanical Birds

Near the central axis of the garden lies the Fountain of the Dragons, surrounded by sweeping stairways. Four-winged dragons emerge from its basin, sending powerful jets of water into the air. The fountain was created in connection with the 1572 visit of Pope Gregory XIII, whose family heraldry featured a dragon, while its imagery also sits naturally within the wider Herculean mythology of the garden.

Further downhill are the long, rectangular Fishponds, which provide a calmer counterpoint to the energetic fountains surrounding them.

Nearby stands perhaps the most ingenious creation at Villa d’Este: the Fountain of the Organ.

Its hydraulic organ was developed by Claude Venard using principles known from ancient writings on pneumatics and hydraulics. Water and air were manipulated to produce musical sounds, astonishing Renaissance visitors. The garden even contained a Fountain of the Owl where hydraulic mechanisms once imitated birdsong before the appearance of an owl silenced the mechanical birds.

These inventions reveal how radically different Villa d’Este must have seemed in the sixteenth century.

It was not a quiet garden designed only for contemplation. It could sing, roar, surprise, and play tricks on its visitors. Art and engineering had become entertainment.

A Garden That Continued to Change

Although Villa d’Este is principally a Renaissance creation, what we see today results from several centuries of alteration, neglect, and restoration.

In the seventeenth century, the garden acquired important Baroque additions. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the elegant Fountain of the Bicchierone in 1660–61, its central form resembling an enormous chalice or drinking glass.

The spectacular Fountain of Neptune, which today appears to be one of the defining features of the garden, is much later in its present form and belongs principally to twentieth-century restoration. Recognising these later layers does not diminish Villa d’Este. Instead, they reveal a garden that continued to evolve long after Ippolito’s death.

Periods of neglect followed the great age of the Este cardinals, but the villa experienced a revival during the nineteenth century under Cardinal Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe. Among the artists drawn here was Franz Liszt, who visited repeatedly and found inspiration in the garden’s atmosphere and water. His Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este transformed the sound of its fountains into music.

The Italian State acquired Villa d’Este in 1920 and undertook major restoration work. Its inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001 recognised not only its exceptional survival but its importance in the history of European garden design.

The Enduring Wonder of Villa d’Este

I have visited Tivoli multiple times, and for me, Tivoli remains one of the most rewarding excursions from Rome.

I usually travel there by train, and perhaps part of its appeal is the contrast. Rome can feel immense, layered, and relentless. Tivoli immediately feels different: more verdant, more compact, and much more intricately woven into the embracing hills and valleys.

And although Hadrian’s Villa understandably attracts enormous attention (including mine), Villa d’Este offers a completely different encounter with the past.

Hadrian created an imperial landscape inspired by the vast Roman world. More than a thousand years later, Ippolito d’Este and Pirro Ligorio created a Renaissance landscape inspired partly by that ancient world but transformed through the imagination of their own age.

What makes Villa d’Este exceptional is not simply the number or grandeur of its fountains. It is the way everything connects.

The steep hillside channels the water’s force. The water shapes the garden. Its design echoes the landscape surrounding the garden. The scenery transforms into myth, and in turn, mythology links Renaissance Tivoli to the ancient world.

Architecture, engineering, nature, and imagination become inseparable.

More than four centuries after Ippolito and Ligorio set their extraordinary garden in motion, water still falls from grottoes, races along channels, rises above stone basins and disappears again into the hillside.

Perhaps this is the reason Villa d’Este retains its sense of being alive.

Click to view a selection of Villa d’Este images

All text, images and content are copyright Steven Sklifas.